Emotions as Dynamical, Self-Organizing Patterns of Salience: Knowing Other Minds Through Emotional Modelling

Monday, July 20, 2026, 11:00 AM

Session: SOC Poster Session (Overflow 2) (In-person)

This project addresses the epistemological problem of other minds from an enactivist and dynamical perspective. Traditional approaches generally conceive of minds as internal and therefore as only indirectly accessible to others. In contrast, this research proposes that emotions may provide a privileged framework through which mindedness itself becomes perceptible. Instead of understanding emotions as secondary internal mental states, the proposal is to conceive them as dynamical, self-organising patterns of salience emerging through organism-environment interactions. Because emotional dynamics are then publicly embodied through behaviour, affective attunement and interaction, they make some constitutive aspects of mindedness perceptible. This project argues that System Dynamics and complexity approaches are particularly suited to modelling these recursive emotional processes due to their non-linearity, feedback organisation and self-organising character. The project is thus interdisciplinary in nature, combining philosophy of mind, enactivism, affective science and System Dynamics. Its primary contribution at this stage is theoretical and conceptual: namely, to propose emotional salience as a bridge between phenomenology and formal modelling, while opening a new direction for the future application of System Dynamics to cognition, affectivity and the study of other minds.